Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address: The Story of America Series [Ep. 28]

00:00:10
Speaker 1: And we continue with our American Stories. Up next, another installment of our series “About Us,” the Story of America series, with Hillsdale College professor and author of the terrific book Land of Hope, Professor Bill McLay. The election of eighteen sixties saw four major candidates compete against one another, with Abraham Lincoln, a political newcomer, coming out victorious. Let’s get into the story. Take it away, Bill. And, in short,

00:00:39
Speaker 2: It was a mess. It would make the likelihood of a Republican victory a probability. Lincoln won one hundred and eighty electoral votes from all eighteen Free States, and only from those states. He didn’t get a single vote, a single electoral vote from the South. It was the first time a President had been elected on an entirely regional basis, and some Southerners warned that such a precedent, such an outcome in this election, would leave the South with no choice but to secede from the Union, which of course prompted the obvious question: Could a state leave the Union? The compact theory of the Constitution, which so many Southerners adhered to, provided a constitutional basis

00:01:29
Speaker 3: for doing so.

00:01:30
Speaker 2: In their view, the Constitution was a compact and agreement contract between and among the states, and that those states had a right to withdraw from that compact in the same way that any contract could be ended if a party could state with reason the cause for ending it. Many Southerners also believe deeply that any act of secession would fall in line with the very tradition of the American Revolution itself, which had been justified on the principle that people have the right to overthrow or replace their government if it doesn’t reflect the consent of the government. Immediately after the election, the State of South Carolina did precisely that, and the reason for this decision, while the justification for it, was the election of Abraham Lincoln. By eighteen sixty one, six additional states—Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas—followed suit. By early February, they had formed their own union, the Confederate States of America. Jefferson Davis was elected President and Alexander Stephens of Georgia Vice President. The important State of Virginia, along with the other Upper South states, was on the fence.

00:02:49
Speaker 3: Was it possible to keep those?

00:02:51
Speaker 2: States from joining the others? Regrettably, President Buchanan, in the remaining four months of his lame-duck presidency, did nothing to keep those states in the Union, and maybe there was nothing that could have been done. One last desperate measure was tried when Congress narrowly passed a constitutional amendment that would have protected slavery where it had existed, something even an anti-slavery man like Lincoln supported. That’s how desperate, how bleak things looked. It spoke volumes

00:03:30
Speaker 3: about the peril the nation faced.

00:03:33
Speaker 2: This amendment passed the House with ease and passed the Senate by one vote just two days before Lincoln’s inauguration. Had it gone on to be ratified by the states, it would have been our Thirteenth Amendment. What a different Thirteenth Amendment than the one we ended up actually having, which abolished slavery. Lincoln wisely remained silent, knowing full well that momentous decisions lay ahead.

00:04:04
Speaker 3: There were so many questions before him. Was there a way to prevent the Southern States from seceding?

00:04:10
Speaker 2: How far would he be willing to go to prevent it? What principles might he be willing to abandon? And those were the easy questions. What would he do if he couldn’t stop secession? Should he simply let the Southern States leave the Union in peace without a fight, or should he use military force to bring the Union back together

00:04:30
Speaker 3: forcibly? Tough decisions, lonely decisions.

00:04:35
Speaker 2: As he assembled his cabinet, even those closest were not fully aware of his plans.

00:04:41
Speaker 3: Perhaps he himself wasn’t either. Many Americans knew little to nothing

00:04:45
Speaker 2: about this tall man born in the backwoods of Kentucky, and he had no experience leading much of

00:04:52
Speaker 3: anything of significance.

00:04:54
Speaker 2: Indeed, until he was President, he never had any executive experience at all.

00:04:59
Speaker 3: It wasn’t until his First Inaugural Address in early March

00:05:02
Speaker 2: of eighteen sixty one that Americans would finally hear from their new President about his aims. Lincoln wasted no time addressing the biggest issue of the day, and he did it directly, addressing the South first, trying his best to adopt the tone of a peacemaker: “Apprehension seems to exist among the people of the Southern States, and by the accession of a Republican administration, their property and their peace and personal security are to be in danger.”

00:05:35
Speaker 3: “Indeed, the most”

00:05:36
Speaker 2: “ample evidence of the contrary has all the while existed and been open to their inspection. It is found in nearly all the published speeches of him who now addresses you. I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery in the states”

00:05:54
Speaker 3: “where it exists.”

00:05:55
Speaker 2: “I believe I have no lawful right to do so, and I have no inclination to do so. The maintenance inviolate of the rights of the States, and especially the right of each State to order and control its own domestic institutions according to its own judgment exclusively, is essential to that balance of power which the perfection and endurance of our political fabric depend. The property, peace, and security of no section are to be in anywise endangered by”

00:06:28
Speaker 3: “the now incoming administration.”

00:06:31
Speaker 2: “I add, too, that all the protection which, consistently with the Constitution and the Laws, can be given, will be cheerfully given to all the States, when lawfully demanded from whatever cause, as cheerfully”

00:06:45
Speaker 3: “to one section as to another.”

00:06:49
Speaker 2: Well, pretty decisive. But Lincoln was just getting started. Lincoln then addressed the issue of secession, and here he loses the tone of peacemaker, and instead adopts the tone of the enforcer and righteous defender of the Constitution, and the idea of a permanently united country. “I hold that, in contemplation of universal law and of the Constitution, the Union of these States is perpetual. Perpetuity is implied, if not expressed, in the fundamental law of all national governments. It were saved to assert that no government proper ever had a provision in its organic law for its own termination. Continue to execute all the express provisions of our national Constitution, and the Union will endure forever, it being impossible to destroy it, except by some action”

00:07:45
Speaker 3: “not provided for in the instrument itself.”

00:07:49
Speaker 2: “Again, if the United States be not a government proper, but an association of states in the nature of contract merely, can it as a contract be peaceably unmade”

00:08:01
Speaker 3: “by less than all of the parties made?”

00:08:06
Speaker 2: “One party to a contract may violate it—break it, so to speak—but does it not require all to lawfully rescind it? Descending from these general principles, we find the proposition that in legal contemplation the Union is perpetual, confirmed by the history of the Union itself. The Union is much older than the Constitution. It was formed, in fact, by the Articles of Association in seventeen seventy four. It was matured and continued by the Declaration of Independence in seventeen seventy six. It was further matured and the faith of all the then thirteen States expressed, plighted, and engaged that it should be perpetual by the Articles of Confederation, and”

00:08:51
Speaker 3: “finally, in seventeen eighty seven,”

00:08:53
Speaker 2: “one of the declared objects for ordaining and establishing the Constitution was to form a more perfect Union. But if destruction of the Union by one or by a part only of the States be lawfully possible, the Union is less perfect than before the Constitution, having lost the vital element of perpetuity. It follows from these views that no State, upon its own mere motion, can lawfully get out of the Union, that resolves and ordinances to that effect are legally void, that acts of violence within any State or States against the authority of the United States are insurrectionary or revolutionary according to circumstances.” You can certainly see from this text what a good lawyer Lincoln was, how adept he was at legal reasoning to support his position.

00:09:51
Speaker 1: When we come back, more of this remarkable story here on our American Stories, and we return to our American Stories in our Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McLay. When we last left off, Bill was reading from Lincoln’s First Inaugural Address. Let’s return to the story now.

00:10:26
Speaker 2: His tone pivots again back to peacemaker. But, with some great rhetorical questions thrown in for good measure about the state of the Union and some who want to destroy it: “That there are persons in one section or another who seek to destroy the Union at all events, and are glad of any pretext to do it. I will neither affirm nor deny. But if there be such, I need address no word to them. To those, however, who really love the Union, may I not speak before entering upon so grave a matter as the destruction of our national fabric, with all its benefits, its memories, and its hopes?”

00:11:13
Speaker 3: “Would it not be wise to ascertain precisely why we do it?”

00:11:18
Speaker 2: “Will you hazard so desperate a step while there’s any possibility that any”

00:11:22
Speaker 3: “portion of the ills you fly from have no real existence?”

00:11:27
Speaker 2: “Will you, while the certain ills you fly to are greater than all the real ones you fly from? We risk the commission of so fearful a mistake. All profess to be content in the Union. If all constitutional rights can be maintained, is it true then that any right plainly written in the Constitution has been denied? I think not. Happily, the human mind is so constituted that no party can reach to the audacity of doing this. Think if you can of a single instance in which a plainly written provision of the Constitution has ever been denied. If by the mere force of numbers of majorities should deprive a minority of any clearly written constitutional right, it might, in a moral point of view, justify revolution. Certainly it would if such right were a vital one. But such is not our case. All the vital rights of minorities and of individuals are so plainly assured to them by affirmations and negations, guarantees and prohibitions in the Constitution; the controversies never arise concerning them.” So now Lincoln goes to the heart of the matter and addresses the issue of secession directly.

00:12:48
Speaker 3: “Plainly,”

00:12:49
Speaker 2: “the central idea of secession is the essence of anarchy. A majority held in restraint by constitutional checks and limitations, and always changing easily with the deliberate changes of popular opinions and sentiments, is the only true sovereign of a free people. Whoever rejects it does of necessity fly to anarchy or to despotism.”

00:13:13
Speaker 3: “Unanimity is impossible.”

00:13:15
Speaker 2: “The rule of a minority as a permanent arrangement is only inadmissible, so that rejecting the majority principle, anarchy or despotism in some form is all that is left.” And now Lincoln goes on to describe the problem facing him and the nation in very stark and simple terms. “One section of our country believes slavery is right and ought to be extended, while the other believes it is wrong and ought not to be extended. This is the only substantial dispute. The Fugitive Slave Clause of the Constitution and the Law for the Suppression of the Foreign Slave Trade are each as well enforced, perhaps, as any law can ever be, in a community where the moral sense of the people imperfectly supports the law itself. The great body of the people abide by the dry legal obligation in both cases, and if you break over in each, this, I think, cannot be perfectly cured, and it would be worse in both cases after the separation of the sections than before. The foreign slave trade, now imperfectly suppressed, would be ultimately revived without restriction in one section, while fugitive slaves, now only partially surrendered, would not be surrendered at all by the other. Physically speaking, we cannot separate. We cannot remove our respective sections from each other, nor build an impassable wall between them. A husband and wife may be divorced and go out of the presence and beyond the reach of each other. But the different parts of our country cannot do this. They cannot but remain face to face. An intercourse, either amicable or hostile, must continue between them. Is it possible, then, to make that intercourse more advantageous or more satisfactory after separation than before? Can aliens make treaties easier than friends can make laws?”

00:15:19
Speaker 3: “Can treaties be”

00:15:19
Speaker 2: “more faithfully enforced between aliens than laws can among friends?”

00:15:25
Speaker 3: “Suppose you go to war.”

00:15:27
Speaker 2: “You cannot fight always. And when, after much loss on both sides and no gain on either, you cease fighting, the identical old questions as to terms of intercourse are again upon you.” And this is the masterly way in which Lincoln closes things out. “My countrymen, think calmly and well upon this whole subject. Nothing valuable could be lost by taking time. If there be an object to hurry any of you in hot haste to a step which you would never take deliberately, that object will be frustrated by taking time.”

00:16:15
Speaker 3: “But no good object could be frustrated by”

00:16:18
Speaker 2: “such of you as are now dissatisfied. Still, you have the old Constitution unimpaired, and on the sensitive point, the laws of”

00:16:27
Speaker 3: “your own framing under it.”

00:16:29
Speaker 2: “While the new administration will have no immediate power, if it would, to change either, if it were admitted that you, who are dissatisfied, hold the right side in the dispute, there’s still no single good reason for precipitate action. Intelligence, patriotism, Christianity, and a firm reliance on Him who has never yet forsaken this favored land. These are still competent to adjust in the best way all our present difficulty. In your hands, my dissatisfied fellow countrymen, and not in mine, is the momentous issue of Civil War.”

00:17:13
Speaker 3: “The Government will not assail you.”

00:17:15
Speaker 2: “You can have no conflict without being yourselves the aggressors. You have no oath registered in Heaven to destroy the Government, while I shall have the most solemn one to preserve, protect, and defend it.”

00:17:31
Speaker 3: “I’m loath to close. We are not enemies, but friends.”

00:17:36
Speaker 2: “We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection. The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battlefield and patriot grave to every living heart and hearthstone all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.”

00:18:10
Speaker 3: A beautiful speech.

00:18:13
Speaker 2: But this speech, as beautiful and brilliant as it was, proved that sometimes rhetoric alone can’t change hearts and minds. This is a divide that Lincoln inherited on his first day of office, and it would soon manifest itself in Lincoln’s first crisis in office, the attack on Fort Sumter, a federal government installation on a small island in the harbor of Charleston, South Carolina. It may have appeared to be a defeat for the Union when, after more than a day of constant bombardment, the fort was surrendered. But Lincoln had adeptly drawn the South Carolinian secessionists into firing the first shots of

00:18:56
Speaker 1: the Civil War. And a terrific job on the production, editing, and storytelling by our own Monte Montgomery, himself a Hillsdale College graduate, and a special thanks to Professor Bill McLay. I want to close with those final words. This speech is so spectacular: “We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.” The story of Abraham Lincoln’s First Inaugural, and so much more, here on our American Stories.